Afghanistan Meteorological Authority (AMA)

Head of the department:Mohammad Ishaq Noori, noorimet(at)gmail.com (20120203, 20131230)

see also http://www.amd.gov.af/

Background:

The Afghanistan Meteorological Authority is located in Kabul, Afghanistan. The authority has been led by Abdul Qadeer since the late 1970s.

In 1996, Taliban forces sacked its office because weather forecasting had been banned as it was considered to be sorcery. Equipment was ruined and over 100 years worth of weather records were destroyed. Because of the ban, farmers were eventually harmed because drought information and forecasting could not take place. Also, in 1998, an Ariana Afghan Airlines flight flew into unexpected weather, causing it to crash into a mountain, killing 45 people.

During the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, the Afghanistan Meteorological Authority had one of the most advanced weather stations available at the time and a staff of 600.

In 2003, France financed the installation of over a dozen simple weather stations around Afghanistan. The stations provide basic information such as temperature, barometric pressure, and rain fall. Also in 2003, the World Meteorological Organization in Geneva provided the Authority with copies of its lost records.

Sep 2016... Perhaps Canadian troops launched the weather balloons for upper air soundings in the past. But, today it is done by contract and NATO meteorologists working together at the Hamid Karzi International Airport on the NATO side of the complex. NATO has a Combined Meteorological Unit that is staffed by a Romanian Officer in Charge, Czech Republic military, and U.S. and Turkish contractors. The mission is to provide full services while the Afghans are trained to take over operations, which is in keeping with the NATO Resolute Support mission. As stated above, the data is available anywhere in the world under the Kabul ICAO identifier which is OAKB.

Afghanistan Meteorology Authority (AMA) has formally been rehabilitated after 42 years and enabled to forecast weather and weather alerts from different parts of the country. AMA was created for the first time in Afghanistan’s Civil Aviation Authority (ACAA) in 1976, but all its infrastructures were destroyed in the decades of war. AMA's revival was started three years ago and formally inaugurated for use on Sunday, Nov 11, 2018. AMA is equipped with new stations and other essential tools and is connected to satellites for providing real time information about weather in each 15 minutes from different parts of Afghanistan.(20181111)